Real time Charting in Revolution
Testimonial

by Jeff McWard
WeHostMacs.com

Hi All Rev Developers,

I want to let you know about a great new product by DerBrill Multimedia. I am an ISP, WeHostMacs.com and have been looking for a way to chart over a hundred thousand data points that I collect from my servers each month. The data points happen to be the load average of the CPU. Load average is a moving set of data that is reported at the 1, 5 and 15 minute marks.

You can see your own if you are using a Mac, by entering "top" or "w" into your terminal window without the quotes.

I am taking this data every minute over the months until I flush the data from the program. It becomes a huge data set.

What this tells me is how the server is doing across the days, weeks and months. It is telling me if the server is ever overloaded and if so to what extent.

So, in comes chartEngine to the rescue. I have been looking for a way to take this data and chart it so it would be much easier to see what all this massive data means.

I started with the most likely candidate, MS Excel, a decent program to do charts in, but to my surprise I was stopped cold by a 32,000 data point limit. My jaw almost hit the ground. A program that cost $229.00 if you buy it a la carte can't chart more than 32,000 data points.

Next up, DeltaGraph 5, another program that has been around for quite a while. During my testing of it I was shocked again. Just pasting in 812,544 data points on 270,848 lines blew-up the program. Hmmmmmm, was not expecting that.

Finally, I gave chartEngine a try. First, Rev was able to handle that same data set that I tried to put in to DeltaGraph 5 in one field with no problem at all.

Next I made my chart and clicked on the "Chart" button to see that my chart was made in 3706 millisecs - that gave me a big smile. Finally I had my graph and it was fast. Very fast.

So at this point, I had to see if I could break it!

Lets see. Lets try 1,000,000 lines with 3 data points per line or 3,0000,000 data points.

It took just 13,330 milliseconds.

How about 3 million lines that should do the trick. Well, it came back in 45,553 millisecs. But, I wanted to see if it was slowing down. Well, it did but only by 13.3% while tripling the lines of data. The 1 million lines processed at 75.0 lines per millisecond. The 3 million lines processed at a rate of 65.7 lines per millisecond.

Ok, let's kill it with 6 million lines or 18 million data points.

Well, all I can say is that it whipped it out in only 104,746 milliseconds and it slowed down by in speed again by 12.8% while doubling the data. The rate at this point was 57.3 lines per millisecond.

In conclusion all I can say is WOW, good job Malte.

If you are looking for a fast and well written charting program I really don't think you can go wrong with chartEngine.

I know of no other solution that can draw the number of data-points and as fast as chartEngine can - period.

Jeff McWard
WeHostMacs.com